This entry was posted in the following categories: News, Web services

CastingWords is a soon to come podcast transcription service - their purpose is to provide transcriptions of recordings to podcasters so that they can post searchable text along with the audio file.

Erick Schonfeld spoke with the company and gathered additional information - apparently they are leveraging Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to produce human-created transcriptions of podcasts.

"We’re a super early stage startup - the idea is to sell search ads against the keywords in the transcriptions, which we generate using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and some whizzy software. But we need capital to pay all those MTurk workers, so in the next few weeks we’ll be opening a store. It will allow Podcasters to purchase transcriptions of their shows. We’ll do the transcriptions and give them a full transcription - not just chunks pulled back by the search engine if it happens to index their show. Of course they automatically get listed in the engine, so this arrangement should drive traffic to them, get them transcripts, and get us the cash needed to keep on transcribing."

Something interesting to keep an eye on for the next few weeks.